Bloodforged (33 page)

Stefan frowned. ‘Another leap,’ he said, then shrugged. ‘But what else have we?’ He turned and started towards the street.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

THE SPIRE

Ulrika and Stefan looked upon the Sorcerers’ Spire from the roof of the building nearest to it, which wasn’t very near at all. The spire sat at the intersection of the Grand Parade, Praag’s main avenue, and the River Lynsk, and was surrounded by a wide empty space, as if the rest of the city was edging away from it. A high stone wall with no door or gate had been built around its base, though whether to keep the public out, or lock something in, Ulrika didn’t know.

From within this barricade, the tower rose like a shattered mast. Even ruined, it stood three times as tall as the tallest of the nearby tenements, its jagged top tearing holes in the low mist that swirled perpetually around it. The lower reaches showed little damage, the red walls straight and true, the buttresses and balconies unbroken, but further up, the stone was scarred and twisted in terrible ways, signs of the deadly energies unleashed when it had exploded. There, the stone grew mottled and crumbling, and gaping black holes yawned in it. Near the top, a section seemed to have melted, the walls folding down on top of each other as if they were made of wet clay, and the pinnacle was just a ragged blackened stump, like the severed wrist of a man who had been holding a bomb when it went off.

‘I do not see or sense anyone,’ said Ulrika.

‘Nor do I,’ said Stefan. ‘Either we have beaten them to it, or they have already taken the violin.’

‘Or it isn’t here after all,’ said Ulrika.

‘Let us go see,’ said Stefan.

They swung down the front of the building, then jogged across the wide bare plaza to the wall that surrounded the tower. Ulrika looked around to see that they were not observed, then started up it. It was crudely made, and did not lack for holds. A row of spikes ran along its top, but she and Stefan stepped between them and clambered down into the narrow, rubble-filled space between it and the tower.

Ulrika sighted up the tower, frowning. Its walls, at least near the base, were much smoother that those of the barricade, and all the windows in the lower storeys had been bricked up. Climbing might be difficult.

Stefan started around the base, looking for a way in. She followed him. On the far side they found the old entrance, a grand, arched opening with stone dragons winding around its columns and the head of a bear growling from the keystone. It was also bricked shut – but not entirely. Near the ground in one corner, a hole had been smashed through the bricks.

Ulrika cursed as they ran to it. ‘They’ve got here before us!’

Stefan shook his head. ‘If they did, it was years before. Look.’

Ulrika peered closer. It was true, the litter of bricks that surrounded the hole was caked in dust. It had been made long ago, and the dust was undisturbed.

‘Bold thieves of ages past,’ said Stefan.

‘My thanks to them for breaking the trail,’ said Ulrika and squatted down to poke her head through the hole.

Inside was a grand entry chamber rising more than three storeys to an arched basalt ceiling inlaid with constellations of bronze stars, planets and moons. Below these false heavens, towering, crumbling statues of men and women in mages’ robes looked down from alcoves set in the walls, their granite hands holding wands, staffs, astrolabes and scales. The statues’ postures were straight and noble, but their stone faces were leering masks of depravity and corruption, tongues sticking out, eyes bulging, pig snouts instead of noses and horns jutting from their foreheads. Surely the sculptors had not carved them that way. She shivered, unnerved, and returned to her survey of the room.

In its centre, a weird double-helix stairway, as delicate as if it had been built by the elves of Ulthuan, rose towards the ceiling from a hill of rubble like a pair of snakes curving around each other, and beyond it, dark doors gaped in the far wall. Some seemed to lead to further rooms, while one opened to a stairway leading down. She pushed her senses out and up and down, searching for heart-fires and pulses hidden in the storeys above and the cellars below, but felt nothing. The place seemed as empty as a tomb.

She squirmed through the hole to the dusty floor and stood, looking around and brushing herself down as Stefan pushed through behind her.

‘Shall we work our way down, or up?’ she asked.

Before Stefan could answer, a sound froze them – a sad, haunting melody drifting down from above, played on a violin.

‘Up, it seems,’ said Stefan, and started for the double set of spiral stairs.

Ulrika shivered, then followed. It sounded like the thing was calling to them. Beckoning them on.

The twin staircases corkscrewed towards the ceiling, but weren’t quite true. They leaned against each other like drunk lovers, neither reaching all the way to the hole in the ceiling through which they had once gone. There was a gap roughly three times Ulrika’s height between the tops and the broken sections that stuck down from the hole, and Ulrika could see that the bases of both stairways had broken too. She swallowed. There was nothing holding the intertwined stairs up but each other. They were not connected at either the base or the top.

‘Perhaps we should try to scale the exterior after all,’ she said.

‘They have stood like this for two hundred years,’ said Stefan. ‘Our paltry weight should make no difference.’

He started up the left-hand stair with confidence. Ulrika waited a moment, ready to spring away if it all came crashing down, then followed. Their feet puffed up huge clouds of dust with every step, but the stairs did not shift or sway.

After two revolutions, they reached the break, and again found signs of earlier explorers. Ropes and pulleys spanned the vertical gap like the work of a giant spider, and a scattering of tools littered the surface of the last crumbling stair.

Stefan stepped to the edge and tugged hard on a rope. A mist of dust shivered from it as it snapped tight, but it held. He put his weight on it, then climbed hand over hand to the stairs that screwed down out of the ceiling.

Ulrika held the bottom of the rope for him, then, when he had pulled himself onto the bottom step, she climbed after him, her skin prickling only a little as she swung out over the long drop. Stefan caught her arm at the top and helped her up onto the hanging steps. The distant violin congratulated them on their efforts with a lilting phrase, then faded away again.

The tune set Ulrika’s teeth on edge. ‘It wants to be free,’ she said.

Stefan nodded, and they drew their rapiers and started curving up through the opening in the ceiling into the chimney of the stairwell. After a full turn they came to a landing that connected to a circular gallery lined with doors. Through these, they could see wood-panelled lecture halls with ranks of benches and lecterns and slates with strange symbols chalked on them. Skeletons in decayed scholars’ robes choked the door of one of the rooms, as if the students had died while all trying to get out of the room at once.

After another half-turn they found another skeleton lying on the stair, head down and face down, as if the man had fallen while running down from above. He held a bar of gold in his skeletal hands. Ulrika winced as she saw that his finger bones were gold too, indeed, all the bones in his hand had turned to gold, and the gilding continued up to his wrists. There were paper-thin flakes of gold leaf all around his hands, as if his skin had turned to gold too. She and Stefan stepped around him and continued on.

A moment later she sensed someone standing at the balustrade on the next level, and looked up, going on guard. No one was there, but as soon as she looked away, she could sense them again, and others too, moving about. She looked at Stefan.

‘Ghosts,’ he said. ‘Or echoes of times past.’

The further up they went, the stranger things became – statues whose eyes wept fresh blood, weird whisperings that burbled lascivious impossibilities in Ulrika’s ears, terrified shrieking from empty rooms, a room where the sun shone brightly through the narrow windows, though all the other rooms were bathed in moonlight.

Nor was all the strangeness tangible. Emotions blew through the tower like gusts of wind, enveloping Ulrika and Stefan briefly in clouds of hate, lust, giddiness or unbearable sorrow, and these winds grew stronger the higher they climbed. Ulrika alternately wanted to weep, or laugh, or attack Stefan, though whether to tear his clothes off or tear his throat out changed by the moment. It was all she could do not to be dragged into the highs and lows of these false feelings, and she held herself clenched with the effort of resisting.

They passed a spot where the stone of the stairs was so hot the soles of their boots smoked and they could not touch the banisters, and another floor where everything – the walls, furniture, wall sconces and people – had turned to glass – a scene of terror and flight frozen in crystalline perfection for centuries. Glass scholars were caught fleeing and looking over their shoulders, as if from an explosion. An older woman shielded a younger woman in her arms. A young apprentice ran, his arms overladen with books. Most were fused to the floor where their feet touched, but a few had snapped from this base and lay in scattered pieces where they had fallen. The violin played again as Ulrika and Stefan passed these unfortunates, and sympathetic vibrations in the glass made it seem as if they were screaming.

A few floors later, the stairs were choked with a dense thicket of gnarled black vines that bore red leaves and fat purple fruit. The vines spilled from the rooms and onto the galleries and spanned the drop between the two spirals. Ulrika and Stefan looked for a way around them, but they filled the whole shaft. There seemed no choice but to crawl through.

With Stefan at her side, Ulrika pushed through the fleshy leaves and pulled herself up onto a vine. She grimaced. Its bark was slick and oily and smelled of mildew. It was hard to maintain her grip. Then a rustling sound brought her head up. Stefan looked around too. The red leaves rattled, then fell silent.

‘What was that?’ asked Ulrika.

‘Rats?’ said Stefan.

They went on, climbing from vine to vine, and burrowing deeper into the thicket. Ulrika paused as she saw a skeleton a few feet below her, fallen between two vines, and then another hanging a little further on. They wore the ragged remains of black clothes, and had ropes and tools slung about them.

‘The ancient thieves?’

Stefan nodded. ‘But what killed them?’

The rustling sound came again, and Ulrika looked around as something moved in the corner of her eye. She turned. It was one of the vine’s bulbous purple fruit, rearing up on its stalk like a snake.

The moment she looked at it, it split like a seedpod and darted straight at her eyes, extending a stamen like a barbed bone needle. She shrieked, and only her inhuman reflexes allowed her to catch the stem before it impaled her pupil with its spike. Another stabbed her arm, the fleshy lips of the pod closing around the spike and sucking at the wound. She tore away from it, howling, and it took a patch of skin with it as it recoiled. Beside her, Stefan was cursing and thrashing as well, and more gaping pods were darting out from the leaves on all sides, stabbing with their stamens.

‘On! On!’ Stefan shouted. ‘Keep moving! Cover your face!’

Ulrika flailed about her, swatting the things back, then pulled her cloak over her head and stuffed part of it in her mouth to keep it tight as she scrambled on, blind and clutching for the next vine.

The pods attacked her from every direction as she went, stabbing her in the arms and legs and back and making her scream and twitch, and from the curses and grunts beside her she knew Stefan was similarly infested. A vision for how it had been for the thieves flashed through her mind. Without the speed of a vampire, they must have been blinded instantly, and then torn apart by the sucking pods as they fought desperately to make their way out of the vines. A horrible death.

Ulrika and Stefan were more fortunate. Indeed, to Ulrika’s relief, but also her confusion, after the initial attacks, the pods bit less and less. They continued to writhe and batter her, but struck less frequently with their spikes, though they seemed angrier and angrier. Finally, Ulrika’s hand touched stone instead of slippery vine, and she crawled out from the thicket onto the steps. Stefan dragged himself out behind her, and they crawled away from it up the steps, as the pods strained at the end of the stalks behind them.